Hitman Absolution is a fascinating case of an error of judgment costing a game its heart. For Absolution, that mistake was placing a focus on a story that didn't need to be told and nobody wanted to hear. The Hitman games have always had narrative, but it existed mainly in vignettes. Tall tales of an assassin ghosting through a theatre, a festival, a sicilian winery, wordlessly dispatching the targets given to him without question. Sometimes the only mark he left were a few bullet cases, sometimes there was nothing at all. Just a terrible accident and when people were asked if they saw anything suspicious that day, they might say "well, there was this bald bloke in a suit..."

Absolution makes the error of giving the ghost a conscience. Agent 47 has been sent to kill Diana Burnwood, his former handler at the agency and the closest thing he has to a friend. But after 47 pulls the trigger, a dying Diana asks him one favour: to take care of Victoria, a girl she freed from the agency that the shady organisation are desperate to get back. 47 obliges, turning his back on the agency, the job and the silent ruthlessness that made him such a great character.

Of course, there's nothing wrong with pushing narrative in video games. Nor is it wrong for a developer to take risks with a beloved series. But you feel Absolution does so for the wrong reasons, to ride on the coat-tails of successful narrative-driven games; to have an excuse to incorporate Uncharted style set-pieces and bombast. But wrong reasons or right reasons, there's little to disguise that Absolution's narrative ultimately fails because it's trash. A grubby and incoherent yarn where the men are vile perverts and all the women are daftly proportioned sex objects. The only exceptions are 47 and Victoria, but she might as well have been named Little Miss MacGuffin, such is the respect and character development she is afforded. No-one expects the underworld of an assassin to be sunshine, lollipops and rainbows, but the boorish, pointless, constant nastiness and dreadful characters are incredibly tiresome. Simply ignoring the story isn't an option, as it infects every inch of Absolution.

The issue for the game itself is that the linear narrative drive causes enormous friction with Hitman's trademark open creativity. The series legacy was built on you being dropped in a large, open, often public area and tasked with eliminating your target (or targets) as you saw fit. It would be a case of canvassing the area, tailing your targets, figuring out their routines and keeping an eye out for accidents waiting to happen. Absolution does make an attempt to recreate similar thrills, with some levels opening up as areas to explore with targets to knock off. These areas are undoubtedly when Absolution is at its best, such as an early level set in a bustling Chinatown with multiple kills options and escape routes, but it struggles to offer the playful, dark invention the series is famous for.

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Areas are too small for a start, albeit packed with visual detail and often swarming with crowds in an impressive technical feat. But the processing power devoted to aesthetic seems to have consequences for the nitty gritty of 47's business. Target's AI routines are incredibly limited, tail them for a few minutes and you will have seen the entirety of their scripting which then loops over and over until you perform your execution. Of course, targets need to have a predictability in order for you to construct your hit, as they always have in Hitman, but in previous games there was usually context and their routines were long enough to make sense. Unlike, say, a goon going for a wee next to a faulty electricity generator every couple of minutes.

You can't deny that Absolution offers you choices when it comes to killing your targets: go in all guns blazing, garrotte them in a dark spot or pick out a signature accident kill. The problem is that the choices never feel like your own. You don't get to customise your loadout before missions anymore, and accident opportunities are provided in blindingly obvious spots as your targets wander past them. Activate 47's new "instinct" ability, which gives him special vision that locates enemies, and the game even highlights accident spots with pulsing circles. This can be switched off on the higher difficulty levels, but the rather trite, constrictive layout of the levels remains the same.

Accident kills are not without their guilty pleasure: sending an electrical current through a gate the moment a target puts his hand on it, dropping a faulty disco ball on a grotty strip club manager's head, or my personal favourite, unhooking a petrol pump near a gangster having a cigarette next to a pile of fireworks during Chinese New Year. Walking away and seeing one corner of Chinatown explode in glitzy spark and crackle is a satisfying touch. But while that kind of setup is funny in that context, it's somewhat indicative of just how telegraphed the accident kills are. You aren't left to work much out for yourself, and often it's just a case of finding an accident hotspot, pressing a button, walking away and waiting for the kill confirmed to pop up in the corner of the screen. The combination of small areas, narrow AI routines and obvious accident kills means the thrill of invention just isn't there.

But the real problems for Absolution start when it completely ditches the idea of assassination altogether in order to push its dreadful story forward. For a large chunk of the game, Absolution is a dreary slog through linear stages. As 47 is on the run from the agency, the repugnant villains and the police, many levels are focussed on evasion and traversal, tasking you with moving from point A to point B, evading or killing enemies as you go. Occasionally you'll be sent on an assassination only for the killing blow to be wrenched out of your hands, instead you're offered a slo-mo shootout or, worse, a cutscene in which 47 fluffs his lines.

Disregarding the fact the it probably has no place in the Hitman series, linearity can still be a real strength for many games. But when you are funnelling your players, you need to supply the tools and design to make the journey exciting. Absolution's main problem is that, by spreading its focus between open assassinations and more generic stealth-action, it succeeds at neither. Which leads to dire compromise.

Take the new disguise mechanic, for instance. As in previous games, 47 can steal the clothes of anyone he's knocked out or knocked off to blend in. In Absolution, now anyone dressed in the same way as you gets suspicious if you wander too close. It makes perfect sense: cops on the hunt for a sharp assassin will naturally find the sudden appearance of a "new guy" a bit dodgy, but won't bat an eyelid if a janitor wanders past them. So the theory is sound. But because finding a disguise and steering clear of similarly dressed enemies would make the traversal areas of Absolution too easy, Io break their own mechanic.

Raising an enemy's suspicion is dreadfully erratic and pays no mind to context. A trooper for the top-secret agency spots another trooper for the top-secret agency dressed in full battle gear including helmet from across a crowded square and is immediately suspicious and opens fire? Daft and annoying. You'll find yourself ducking behind cover to break sightlines and reset any suspicion, which leads to the ludicrous situation that doing forward-rolls between cover under the noses of your pursuers is less suspicious than walking around like a normal person. And why is it that 47 leaves perfectly decent balaclavas behind when disguising himself as a hoodlum so all and sundry can see his shiny bonce?

A clumsy structure leads to further mechanical hitches. Mid-level checkpoints can be found and activated on the lower difficulty levels, but they inexplicably reset everything in the level except for objectives. And there's some weird continuity issues related to the small areas. At one point, I fudged my stealthy infiltration of a secret facility while dressed as a guard, so fought off streams of enemies called to the area, killed them all (you have to be clear before you can exit a section) and entered an elevator. Having murdered everyone nearby and got into that elevator dressed in combat fatigues and toting an assault rifle, 47 emerged in his trademark suit downstairs as if nothing had happened. Because super-secret evil lairs aren't fussed when someone assaults the front desk, presumably.

It's just all so messy. But appalling narrative aside, Absolution is rarely egregiously awful. There's a nice array of challenges that encourage replays, it controls slickly enough and occasionally the level design hits a balance that does incorporate the best of the game's two disparate styles. Usually these levels will provide a target to eliminate, an open area and scattered pockets of enemies to stalk and dispose of; each group of bad guys a conundrum to solve on your way to the true target. It's not Hitman as we know it --placing 47 in an immediately hostile area rather than hiding him in plain sight-- but it makes the most of what Absolution provides.

Somewhat ironically, the level that inspired the controversial "stripper nuns" trailer is arguably the game's best, pitting 47 against the Saints hit-squad and their entourage across three varied stages at a motel, gas station and surrounding farmland. Creeping through an atmospheric cornfield dressed as a Scarecrow and stopping dead when a bad guy wanders close is a particular highlight. It's a tantalising glimpse of what might have been, though it perhaps says all you need to know about the game's tone that this stage is about murdering six women dressed in latex catsuits, knee-high platform boots and habits.

But even Absolution's most successful missions would be laughed out of Blood Money's marvellous selection of inventive assassinations. And if you decide to take Absolution at face value and forget you're supposed to be playing Hitman, you're still left with a bog-standard stealth-action game with capricious mechanics and a moronic narrative.

Completing the package with a little more sophistication is the Contracts mode. This is a multiplayer mode of sorts, which allows you to revisit areas from the campaign and create your own "hits", which you can then upload for friends and other would-be-assassins to challenge. It's not a level editor, as such, instead you play through the level as in the campaign, but you can select your own target, with bonus objectives added depending on if you are spotted, what weapon you used to kill your mark and even what clothes you were wearing at the time. Other players must then match your stipulations and are awarded bonus points for pulling off the hit faster than you.

It's a clever idea, inviting a silly playfulness into the open levels of the game, recalling Hitman's legacy better than the campaign manages. You're still left with the fundamental problem of narrow level design limiting the mode's potential, though it's likely the game's community will stretch the premise as far as it will go when the game sees general release. And hopefully Contracts' core idea will be expanded upon when the next Hitman game rolls around.

Because, despite the fact that Absolution is a hugely disappointing entry into the canon, Hitman is still a fabulous series. It deserves better, frankly, and even the briefest flashes of invention in an otherwise tawdry and misjudged game like Absolution leave you encouraged that, one day, Hitman can return to its best with the right focus. Agent 47 certainly isn't dead, then, but this botched hit has left him wounded.